Comment by biddit
20 hours ago
> Agents that source quotes, negotiate prices, and get the best deals.
Didn't Alexa fail miserably with the "have AI buy something for me" theory?
There is a significant mental in allowing someone else make purchase decisions on my behalf:
- With a human, there is accountability.
- With deterministic software, there is reproducibility.
With an agent, you get neither.
FWIW - I am not anti-LLM. I work with them and build them full time.
We are using AgentMail for sourcing quotes here at scale with various top shippers. It’s not about letting the agent act in fully deterministic ways, it’s about setting up the right guardrails. The agents can now do most of the job, but when there’s low confidence on their output, we have human in the loop systems to act fast. At least in competitive industries like logistics, if you don’t leverage these types of workflows, you’re getting very behind, which ultimately costs you more money than being off by some dollars or cents when giving a quote back.
Okay that makes sense.
Do you see more pushback in specific industries? I did some quote/purchasing automation work in food mfg a decade ago, and those guys were super difficult to work with. Very opaque, guarded, old-school industry.
I've seen different industries. CPG, mfg, and others are very old school still. Logistics moves so fast. I think it's due to how frequent feedback loops are that puts pressure on players to adopt to new tools.
This refers to B2B use cases that are live in production. Finding, contacting, and negotiating with vendors is a tedious process in many industries. In the time a human reaches out to 10 vendors, an agent reaches out to 100 or 1000. So it finds deals that a human would not have.
Once vendors are getting AI spam sent to 1,000 of them and their competitors, they will stop responding and find other sales channels. This won't be sustainable.
Unless they have agents reading those emails and responding ...
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But if you hire ten or 100 real humans you have accountability and the same number of contacts per day?
Are logistics companies really that poor so they cannot afford to pay workers wages?
By that logic why send email newsletters when I could hire 10 or 100 people email them manually instead? Obviously there's a cost tradeoff here where it's worth it to have email negotiation in an automated way, but not in a human call center way.
The tradeoff isnt agents vs humans its where humans sit in the loop.
Sure hiring 10–100 humans gives accountability, but reality is it doesn't scale in any comparable way compared to agents in speed, coverage, or responsiveness. The sheer volume agents can pump out(more vendors, more quotes, faster cycles) is the benefit, while humans retain accountability at the decision boundary.
In practice the agent does the gruntwork, and the human gets looped in when confidence is low. Accountability doesnt dissapear, it gets concentrated where it matters most